Whether you’re 14, 19 or 90, you can defend your home against armed intruders

For the past few days, the internet has been buzzing about two amazing self-defense stories, each involving young people. The first to hit the wires was the story of 19-year old Sarah McKinley.

On Christmas Day, McKinley’s 58-year old husband died of cancer, leaving her alone with their three month old baby. When two knife-wielding men attempted to break into her home to steal her late husband’s painkillers, McKinley grabbed her guns, called 911, and asked for help. In a polite colloquy with the 911 operator, McKinley asked if it was okay to shoot the intruders if law enforcement, which was still several minutes away, didn’t arrive in time. The operator said McKinley, who fortunately lives in a state giving homeowners the right to armed self-defense, could do what she needed to do to protect her baby. McKinley did just that:

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Well, we’re not as bad off as Britain yet. Thank God for the Second Amendment.

But it is still a troubling sign that people think they have to ask permission to defend themselves when their homes are being invaded at that very moment. Were I King of America, home invasion would be a capital crime.

We live in a country where people ask the State if it’s ok to defend their lives from attack by taking down a violent adult male but a woman can abort her own child any time she wants, for whatever reason she wants, and Obama’s State wants to help her pay for it. Apparently a woman can control her own body, not her own home.

Is it any wonder I’m a declinist?

MacG

Excathedra, we are in tension with our laws EG a woman carrying can be struck, causing a miscarriage and the striker can in some states be charged with homicide even if she she was on her way to the abortion clinic. They say it has to do with when a fetus becomes human. Whenever that is what is it before? A lizard? Lest a reader assert that ‘ontology recapitulates phylogeny’ I offer that was the old science and has been disproven. Time to throw out your old college texts. Darwin’s black box is now illuminated, albeit dimly.

Book on a technical note for the webmaster I clicked and routed to the 404 page and it told me to look in the archive and not loose hope. I should keep hope fettered and remain hopeless? Perhaps not lose hope? Yes, I think that’s right. 🙂

Danny Lemieux

The way I put it to people when discussing the right to self defense, “who owns your life?”.

If you own your life, you have the right to do anything you need to do to defend it because nobody has the right to deny you your life (along with liberty and the pursuit of happiness). If, on the other hand, the State tells you how and under what circumstance you are permitted defend your life, then it is the State that owns your life.

It is natural for the State, the Sovereign, to own resources because most people don’t have a clue on how to take care of themselves. The question is, should an individual choose to make that situation worse or better. That is the question, ethically speaking. Will you fight for the Light… or the Darkness?

Btw, Book, if your children like the military, eventually they may get the idea that they want to shoot a gun. In this respect, I’d like you to look up something called a spring airgun. They seem to be relatively inexpensive, do not require permits even in California, and trains the same fine motor skills as firearms use.

This will also piss off (and frighten) your husband. But your son should benefit greatly from it. It is also a way to test whether individual children are “mature” enough to pay attention to firearm safety practices. A lot of children that have these airsoft guns, do not follow safety practices, because they were never groomed to progress to real firearms. They pick up bad habits.

The more powerful airsoft rifles can even kill rodents and small game at 30 ft. Silent weapons in their own right, though far more expensive than most civilians will ever want, even for a hobby. Those are, of course, banned in Britain. What else.

ex cathedra: If you’re correct about this profound change in our mindset, either the 2012 elections are pointless, or they matter incredibly, not just because of national security and the economy, but because it’s our last chance to preserve the American mindset.

MacG: No one ever said moral/ethical issues would be easy! As for not losing hope with the 404 messages, never lose hope.

Danny: You’re taking ex cathedra’s point and asking the right question. Of course, if I had to answer, I’d say my kids, my husband and my mother own my life.

Ymarsakar: My son isn’t quite old enough for an air rifle. He’s still at the age where he’s perfectly likely to shoot out a friend’s eye, not out of any malice, but just because his good sense, although developing very well, is not yet developed.

This is what’ll work if you ask me. I’ll put a kid next to a watermelon and tell him not to move. Then I’ll blow out the watermelon with a magnum or .50 caliber, as those tend to make big noise and target destruction. Then I’ll say something to the effect of “this is what tends to happen when you wave guns in front of things and people. If you think you got what it takes to follow the rules, you too can wield power. Disobeying them will mean your head will be like that watermelon however, so think carefully”.

Psychological conditioning of this sort will easily, especially against kids, either the scare the wits out of them so they won’t ever touch a gun or force them to obey the rules.

There are two sure fire ways to regulate people’s behavior. Fear and mutual benefit. If a kid doesn’t think he wants to follow safety rules because it will benefit everyone, then I’ll just put his hand over the muzzle and pull the trigger. He won’t even realize the chamber is empty until he hears the click and realize his hand is still intact. Those that will not listen to reason, will listen to their bodies as they feel it. Not even young reckless bucks will ignore that sort of lesson.

I definitely know six year olds in America have been conditioned to be able to handle firearms without the family ending up in jail for murder or suicide. Definitely. And I have my own ideas of how to make sure accidents don’t happen. Btw, great job on the part of the kid brother in the news report. He did as a man should; he protected his sister. That’s what the size, experience, age, and greater strength of a brother should be used for. Annihilating all enemies to those under his protection, without mercy or restraint. The world would be a safer place, and would have little need of bloodshed and violence, if everyone was that way. But they aren’t, now are they. Until Utopia comes, I’ll be stacking the deck in my favor.

My sister is married to a retired CA corrections officer – prison guard – who was required to carry a 9mm sidearm at work with which he had to be proficient. He is also retired Navy and was trained with standard mil weapons. Their two daughters are Army trained in the use of M16, M4, SAW M249, 9mm sidearm, and Patriot Missile Battery. While the youngest daughter and her husband, also Army, are away on duty, my sister is the grandson’s caretaker. Living in a Nor California prison town, she has decided it’s time to learn to use a firearm herself in case the need to protect herself and grandson ever arises when husband is not available. She knows that in California she must retreat to the farthest corner of her home before blowing away the bad guy in order to avoid being charged with a crime herself.

jj

I think I might have been six the first time I fired a .22 pump pellet gun. (The bellows was stiff, it took me some doing to pump the sucker, I just couldn’t do it all before then. And when you loaded three pumps into it – that was a gun.) Maybe seven or eight when I got the lessons in nines – a brace of Lugers that came home with my father. By a very short time thereafter I had fired everything in the house a bunch, and had already come to the conclusion I preferred the deer and pheasants walking and flying around in peace. Venison was great – but we had enough to eat.

There are two ways to teach people to handle guns. You can render them terrified, so they stay away from them forever; or you can render them proficient. Proficient is always better: use it correctly, respect it appropriately, don’t be afraid of it. Guns are machines, when handled correctly their behavior is entirely, 100%, predictable – like any other machine. They aren’t going to freelance, and they aren’t going to sneak up on anybody. You can learn this well before the age of ten.

I was a range officer back east – we all shot a lot – and I noticed something about kids with whom I worked. Kids are kids, yes. Absolutely. But if you approach them seriously, on a subject that is serious, to impart serious information and a serious lesson – they will be serious. You’ll be surprised how serious they’ll be. They’ll pay attention, and take it to heart. They can be taught, and they can be made safe. (They can in fact be made little Nazis about making sure everyone around them at the range – the adults in particular – are behaving safely, too. Which is okay with me.)

The thing that impressed me about the young lady above was that she knew what she was doing. She had, I’ve seen in the the pictures, a shotgun. She knew how to load it, she knew how to hold it, she knew how to fire it, and she knew where the pattern was going to go, so she knew how to do the most damage, and leave the bad guy on the floor dead. No flopping around, Charlie, just: ‘welcome to the next world.’ Seems like an okay outcome to me.

We don’t have a ‘castle’ law in this state, but we are free to protect ourselves, our homes, our cars, etc., so though it isn’t called a ‘castle’ law (there’s a reason for that, too, which I currently forget), that’s effectively what we have. The only thing you need a license for is to carry concealed, it’s perfectly okay to carry openly, though they do try to discourage it in Seattle. (And that’s just because it’s such a pain in the cop’s asses. The liberal halfwits who infest the place will be dialing 911 to the point that they practically have to assign a cop to walk along with you, so he can say: “yeah, yeah – we know! Don’t call 911, it’s perfectly okay!” to every moron who sidles up to him and tries to discreetly point at your sidearm.) But if somebody tries to break into your house, or mug you on the street, or car-jack you – feel free. If you put him down clean in one, the reaction from the cops will tend to be: ‘nice shot.’

Book’s primary difficulty is that she lives in California. Not only does she have laws to deal with, but the culture doesn’t support her. If she lived in the boondocks of Texas, Alabama, Miss., or Georgia, it’d be different. There people have a “gun culture” so to speak, and can offer moral and ethical support. OR even legal support in the case of witness testimonies.

In California, everything is working against her, which is why I brought up airsoft guns. They are one of the few things that you can use to train marksmanship skills and gun safety rules, without ever running afoul of gun laws.

The longer she waits, the harder it will be to train her kids. It’s much easier to train a 6-10 year old in how to obey the rules. If you try the same thing with a teenager, the teenager, because of hormonal imbalance and mood swings, will often do stupid things like blow their head off or their friend’s head off, because they got “upset”. And because they don’t want to listen to their parents any more. And because their peers are full of ideas of how “guns” should be handled, which is just suicidal. If you don’t get em while they are young, Book, you’ll be surprised at how difficult is to train them once Californian culture gets hold of them. If you think your personal inhibitions about using guns were bad, just wait until the upbringing brings it on the children. That’s how California got the anti gun culture to begin with. It passes from parents to sons and daughters.

Don’t break the cycle, it’s never going to get broken, so to speak.

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